Eavestrough Cleaning in Edmonton — Spring and Fall

Timing

When to clean eavestroughs in Edmonton

Two windows, and they are not equally important.

• Late fall, after leaf drop — the one that counts. In this city that is usually late October into November, once the poplars and birches have finished and before the ground freezes hard. Clean too early in the autumn and you pay to do it again, because the last three weeks of leaf drop refill the run.
• Spring, after the snow has gone. A lighter job: winter grit, seed pods, whatever the wind put up there, and a check that nothing tore loose under ice load. This is also the natural moment to look at what winter did to the roof.

Houses with mature trees overhead, or a roof that sheds heavy granule, sometimes need a third visit mid-summer. Everyone else is fine with two.

What a proper clean includes

• Debris removed by hand, not flushed down the run. Gutter cleaning done with a hose alone moves the problem rather than removing it, and washing a season of wet leaf mulch towards the outlet is how downspouts block solid.
• Every downspout flushed and checked. Water in at the top, water out at the bottom. A leader that is blocked halfway is invisible until it overflows in a storm.
• Outlets, mitres and valley discharge points cleared. These block first and are the reason one corner overflows while the rest behaves.
• Slope, hangers and seams checked while we are there. Standing water after the flush means the fall is wrong, which is a repair rather than a cleaning issue — see eavestrough repair.
• Photographs of anything worth seeing. Granules, rot behind the trough, lifted shingles at the eave, a torn section. You get the pictures either way.

What blocked eavestroughs actually cause here

Overflowing in a rainstorm is the least of it. In Edmonton a blocked run causes four things.

• Ice at the eave. A trough full of frozen debris gives meltwater somewhere to pond and freeze, which deepens an ice dam and holds water higher up the slope. It does not create the dam — that is an attic heat problem — but it makes it worse. See ice dam roof damage.
• Fascia rot. Water sitting against the back of the trough soaks the timber it is screwed to, and eventually the hangers have nothing to hold. That turns a $200 cleaning problem into fascia replacement.
• Water at the foundation. Water that overflows lands beside the wall, saturates the backfill, and then freezes and expands against the basement.
• Loaded hangers. Wet debris is heavy and frozen debris is heavier. Most runs that tear off in January were full in November.

Granules in the eavestrough are a roof signal, not a gutter problem

This is the part a window-cleaning crew will not tell you, because it is not their trade. The coarse grit in the bottom of the trough is the mineral surface off your shingles, and it is the roof's wear indicator. A little after a new roof is normal — loose granules from manufacture wash off in the first year. Steady accumulation years later means the mats are exposed and ageing. A sudden pile after a summer storm means hail knocked the granules off, and that is a claim question rather than a maintenance one.

What to do about it: photograph it, note the date, and get the roof looked at before the insurer's clock runs. The signs of hail damage on an Edmonton roof covers what else to look for, and the free inspection answers it properly.